Allow me to introduce you to Bruce Gilley, pictured above. Gilley is no longer associated with New College of Florida. Currently, he is a professor of political science and director of the PhD program in Public Affairs and Policy at the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University.
I picked out the above picture to give you a hint that Gilley is a bit of an academic "radical." Not too many political science professors are willing to say that they think colonialism has had a lot of really good effects, but while I haven't read the book, personally, that does seem to be Gilley's contention. Wikipedia tells us that Gilley gained international acclaim for "The Case for Colonialism," which was first published in an advance online edition of Third World Quarterly in 2017. Fifteen members of the Third World Quarterly board resigned over Gilley's article.
Gilley's "untraditional" approach to politics continues. I first heard about Gilley from an opinion column that ran in the March 30, 2026, edition of The Wall Street Journal. In that column, titled, "What Do Democrats Mean By 'Democracy'?" Gilley opines that the greatest danger to "democracy" in the United States is the Democratic Party, which aims to impose a "leftist majority." You can, at least maybe you can, read Gilley's column by clicking the link.
As for Gilley's thesis, you may be as surprised as I was by the suggestion that anyone who is concerned that our current president is attempting to install an authoritarian government here in the United States is just about 180 degrees off base. Don't worry about the Republican Party. The real authoritarians are the Democrats!
To be honest, I am not very much enthused by either one of our major political parties, and I really don't like the fact that we seem to have nothing but a binary choice: Red or Blue. Republican or Democrat. It is most definitely not comforting to be told that either way we swing, we are really choosing authoritarianism. But is Gilley right? I am not immediately dismissive of the idea that the Democratic Party has authoritarian tendencies. In 2016, I was an official delegate for Bernie Sanders, and the party apparatus played lots of dirty tricks to squelch any possibility that Bernie might have been nominated to represent the party in the upcoming election - the election that put our current president into office for his first term.
Regular readers of this blog of mine know that I think that what we really need is "self-government," and that "democracy," so-called, is something different from that. When ordinary citizens are not, themselves, in some significant numbers, personally involved in our government (at all levels, and particularly at the local level) the wealthy and the well-connected (the same people) are almost sure to take over.
Isn't that what has happened to us (both parties participating)?
If you don't like "colonialism," and you don't like "authoritarianism," either, consider getting together with a group of friends and start taking over your government, beginning from the bottom up!
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